Chicago Artists' Coalition moves into the 21st century

In the past 18 months, the 37-year-old Chicago Artists' Coalition has launched so many new endeavors, you'd think it was a startup.

Which, of course, is far from the truth.

It was in 1975 that the nonprofit advocacy organization had its first big victory. Barely a year after it was founded, CAC played a major role in the foundation of the Chicago Office of Fine Arts — the present day Department of Cultural Affairs. Established by artists for artists, the CAC operated for decades on membership dues and little else. For a dozen years it hosted an open art exhibition, which in 2010 was rebranded as The Art Open. Occasionally, tax seminars for artists were offered.

But in all of its years, the organization, whose mission is to educate the public on the value of art in society while providing support, advocacy and professional development to artists, never hosted a public benefit.

Until this summer.

On Aug. 18, CAC's historically insular community will mingle with the public at a benefit dubbed "Starving Artist," for which hip, young artists have been paired with hip, young culinary stars to create original food and art. And if that event sounds like it's going against the grain of the group's staid almost four-decade history, you can thank — or blame — Carolina Jayaram.

A 36-year-old attorney from Miami, Jayaram is Chicago Artists' Coalition's executive director, a job she was more or less bullied into in January 2010. Jayaram explained over lunch recently how she came to head an organization that until then, in her mind, was "dormant."

"I was hesitant to do it, of course, and it was almost a gift that I wasn't from here, so I didn't have a lot of the preconceptions that people had about CAC: that it was Sunday painters, an irrelevant organization that had grown stale," Jayaram said. "The perception I had was from people who had been part of the art community for so long, who felt that no one had stepped into this void of providing these services. There is no other organization that's doing what CAC needs to be doing."

The organization's mission hasn't changed. But historically, Jayaram said, professional development was sporadic. A monthly newspaper was published, with updates on its aging members. It was the first thing Jayaram got rid of when she took over, because it was "prohibitively expensive."

"We just couldn't afford it," Jayaram said. "We needed to be streamlining to make a bigger impact with less money."

Something had to change. Instead, everything changed.

With Jayaram at the helm, the Chicago Artists' Coalition has stepped up its exhibition programming as well as its professional development. A move in June from Wicker Park to the West Loop increased physical exhibition space by almost 400 percent, the bulk of which is given over to the organization's Coalition Gallery program, in which 16 juried artists manage and show in the space.

The Coalition Gallery program is about to enter its third year. But virtually everything else under CAC's umbrella is new under Jayaram.

The new location's sublevel studio space allowed for the establishment of an artists' residency, BOLT Residency, which launched in June. A professional development series, Art Business Create (A.B.C.), offers practical business workshops almost monthly. In September, a networking event dubbed Portfolio Perfect Boot Camp will pair artists one-on-one with dealers, "like speed dating," Jayaram said. And by 2012, an arts-centric microloan program should come to fruition.

Everything, in Jayaram's mind, is designed to teach artists to embellish their careers.

"I train artists to be business people," Jayaram said. "That's my job. That's as far as I go, to try to make them responsible for the economic choices they're making."

Call it tough love. The arts community is noticing.

Among them is Chicago Artists Resource Director Barbara Koenen, who first met Jayaram as the co-founder and executive director of Miami's LegalArt.

"(Jayaram) was able to look at all kinds of national best practices and figure out how to adapt them to Chicago," Koenen said, "stuff that we (at the Department of Cultural Affairs) could never do. … She's connecting artists with collectors and identifying a new collector base. That's all stuff that lays a really solid foundation for the organization moving forward."

Shannon Stratton, founder and executive director of Threewalls, said her organization didn't have much of a relationship with the Chicago Artists' Coalition prior to Jayaram's arrival.

"A citywide professional organization for artists that helps them with professional development, I think most cities have them," Stratton said. "I just think prior to Carolina, there was no fresh energy behind it. It was stuck in a different era. … But Carolina started a very interesting organization in Miami, and her interests, law and arts administration, make her the right person for the job. She's interested in pragmatic issues."